CDS (II) 2023 General Knowledge · Question 18 of 120

Correct — B, 2 only. The Levallois technique is a way of making stone tools, and statement 2 describes it accurately. Instead of hammering flakes off a lump at random, the knapper first shapes the core itself — trimming its edges and grooming one face into a domed surface — so that when a single carefully placed blow is finally struck, the flake that comes away already has the size, the shape and the sharp all-round edge that was intended. Archaeologists call it a prepared-core technique, and the flake, point or blade it produces is a Levallois flake. It appears from roughly 250,000 to 400,000 years ago, in the Middle Palaeolithic, and is strongly associated with Neanderthals in Europe as well as with early modern humans in the Levant and North Africa. The name has nothing to do with any of that: it comes from nineteenth-century finds of flint tools at Levallois-Perret, a suburb of Paris. Statement 1 attaches the term to perforated Harappan pottery, which belongs to a different material, a different continent and a period tens of thousands of years later, so it is simply false.

• (a)1 only — Reverses the truth. Perforated pottery from Harappan sites is a ceramic form, thought to have been used in straining or in fermenting; naming that process after a Palaeolithic French suburb would make no sense.
• (c)Both 1 and 2 — The all-of-them pick, which fails on statement 1. A single technical term does not cover both prehistoric stone knapping and Bronze Age ceramic manufacture.
• (d)Neither 1 nor 2 — Rejects a statement that is correct. Statement 2 is the textbook definition of the Levallois technique — the making of prehistoric flake tools from a specially prepared core.

Stone Age technology is classified by how flakes were removed. The Lower Palaeolithic is dominated by core tools — the Oldowan chopper and then the Acheulian handaxe and cleaver, shaped by knocking flakes off a core and keeping the core. The Middle Palaeolithic shifts to flake tools, and the Levallois prepared-core method is its signature: the core is engineered so that the flake, not the core, is the finished implement. The Upper Palaeolithic moves on to long parallel-sided blades struck from prismatic cores, and the Mesolithic to tiny microliths hafted in composite tools.

Two statements, one obviously about stone tools and one about pottery, so the item is really asking whether a candidate knows which discipline the word belongs to. The clue is in the name — Levallois is a French place, and French place-names in prehistory almost always mark a European Palaeolithic type site, as with Acheulian from Saint-Acheul, Mousterian from Le Moustier and Aurignacian from Aurignac. Harappan terminology, by contrast, runs to Indian site names. It is worth remembering why the technique matters rather than only what it is: preparing a core before striking it means the knapper is holding the finished shape in mind several steps in advance, which archaeologists read as evidence of planning and of a mental template. The same paper elsewhere asks about Palaeolithic blades and about Isampur in Karnataka, so this family of terms is clearly on the examiner's list.

• The Levallois technique is a prepared-core method: the core is shaped first so that a single blow detaches a flake of predetermined size and shape.
• It belongs to the Middle Palaeolithic and appears from roughly 250,000 to 400,000 years ago.
• It is associated chiefly with Neanderthals in Europe and also with early modern humans in the Levant and North Africa.
• The name comes from nineteenth-century finds at Levallois-Perret, a suburb of Paris.
• It yields flakes, points and blades used as scrapers, knives and projectile tips — not pottery of any kind.

• Assuming a technical term must belong to Indian archaeology; Levallois, Acheulian and Mousterian are all named from European type sites.
• Mixing the Palaeolithic with the Harappan period, which are separated by tens of thousands of years and by an entirely different technology.
• Treating Levallois as a tool type; it is a method of preparing a core, and the tool is what comes off it.

As a two-statement true-or-false item on a technical term, or as a match between a technique or tool type and its period.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Levallois technique is characteristic of which one of the following periods?

  • (a)Lower Palaeolithic
  • (b)Middle Palaeolithic
  • (c)Mesolithic
  • (d)Neolithic

  Answer(b) Middle Palaeolithic — the phase in which flake tools struck from prepared cores replace the handaxe-and-cleaver tradition of the Lower Palaeolithic.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Acheulian tool tradition takes its name from a site in which one of the following countries?

  • (a)India
  • (b)France
  • (c)Kenya
  • (d)Spain

  Answer(b) France — from Saint-Acheul near Amiens, just as Levallois comes from Levallois-Perret near Paris and Mousterian from Le Moustier.